After Wonder Man: The history of the Department of Damage Control in the MCU
After seeing the DODC as the main villains of Wonder Man, and knowing they are also rumored to be >!part of Brand New Day as well as a central part of the next Saga!<, I decided to make this post to run through their history in the MCU; from doing clean-up work as a part of SHIELD to becoming an independent Department of the US government hunting down enhanced individuals.
Damage Control was first mentioned all the way back in Iron Man 1, when Phil Coulson informed Tony right before his press conference, that a special SHIELD team called Damage Control had been dispatched at both the highway where the battle against Iron Monger had taken place, as well as Tony's factory where Obadiah died, in order to clean up the scenes. We don't know exactly when that special SHIELD team was formed, but we can assume they go all the way back to at least the 90s, when the first Skrull invasion took place and SHIELD needed to hide the evidence of aliens and enhanced individuals from the general public. It might even date as far back as the dawn of super-hero operatives on both sides of the cold war (Red Guardian and Ant-Man) during the 70s.
After aliens and super-heroes became public knowledge in 2012, however, the team didn't need to operate covertly anymore. Therefore, the US Government decided to turn Damage Control into its own executive Department with the funding of Tony Stark and Stark Industries. Their first clean-up work was the Battle of New York, where they took the job over Adrian Toomes' crew, unknowingly pushing them into villainy.
On top of cleaning up after the messes created by enhanced individuals and aliens, this new Department had its own warehouses where they stored all the dangerous items and artifacts left behind from those battles, similar to SHIELD's respective warehouses like The Fridge.
It was in Fall 2016 when Toomes, as Vulture, raided one of their armored trucks in Washington DC and Spider-Man, in an attempt to stop him, got knocked out and woke up locked in, in one of those warehouses.
Sometime after SHIELD's fall in 2014, the Dapertment Of Damage Control additionally absorbed the rest of the duties of its former parent agency, including responding to supernatural threats and neutralizing them, investigating supernatural incidents, indexing and surveiling potentially dangerous enhanced individuals as well as arresting and detaining them in case they step out of line.
It was around 2017/2018 when they investigated the Doorman incident on the set of Cash Grab 2 and apprehended DeMarr Davis.
8 months after the blip, Agent P. Cleary, who operated out of the DODC's New York Office, was chosen to spearhead the investigation on Peter Parker/Spider-Man regarding the death of Mysterio and the launch of the drone attacks in Mexico, Marocco, Venice, Prague and London, for which he was the prime suspect.
In order to subdue the enhanced, the DODC started using advanced weapons and technology, reverse-engineered from all the items they (and SHIELD) had been confiscating over the years, as well as Stark weapons that Tony had sold to SHIELD prior to 2008, like his sonic canons that were used to subdue the Hulk. The DODC managed to reduce said weapons to the size of a rifle and have been using them as their primary non-lethal neutralizers against superhumans.
In addition to that, the DODC weaponized much of Tony Stark's technology which they confiscated in 2024 during the Spider-Man/Mysterio case, including his EDITH drones, which were used the subsequent year in the hunt of Ms. Marvel and the Djinn known as Clandestines.
The DODC also operates a supermax prison in California since at least 2024, which used to hold Abomination for the last few years of his sentence and also briefly held She-Hulk and the Clandestines, until the release of the former and the escape of the latter.
After his failed operation to apprehend Kamala Khan and Kamran, P. Cleary was relocated to the Los Angeles office of the agency where he and his fellow agents were told by the Deputy Secretary of the Department, Heyerdahl, that they needed to apprehend more enhanced to fill up their prison, unless they wanted the government to cut their funding. This led Agent Cleary tο start an investigation on Simon Williams, who he believed was a dangerous superhuman, with the help of Trevor Slattery as an inside man.
Next, the DODC is rumored to appear in >!Destin Daniel Cretton's Spider-Man: Brand New Day, with Tramell Tillman supposedly playing the DODC's Secretary who will be personally spearheading the hunt for Sadie Sink's dangerous, rogue superhuman character (rumored to be none other than Jean Grey herself), while the DODC as a whole is rumored to become the MCU's mutant-hunting agency in the next Saga after Secret Wars!<
What do you want to see in the DODC's future? Would you like to see a series from their point of view like Agents of SHIELD? Such a show was being developed by the prior Marvel Television leadership back in the mid 2010s, but was eventually cancelled in 2016 before it entered production.
Damage Control was first mentioned all the way back in Iron Man 1, when Phil Coulson informed Tony right before his press conference, that a special SHIELD team called Damage Control had been dispatched at both the highway where the battle against Iron Monger had taken place, as well as Tony's factory where Obadiah died, in order to clean up the scenes. We don't know exactly when that special SHIELD team was formed, but we can assume they go all the way back to at least the 90s, when the first Skrull invasion took place and SHIELD needed to hide the evidence of aliens and enhanced individuals from the general public. It might even date as far back as the dawn of super-hero operatives on both sides of the cold war (Red Guardian and Ant-Man) during the 70s.
After aliens and super-heroes became public knowledge in 2012, however, the team didn't need to operate covertly anymore. Therefore, the US Government decided to turn Damage Control into its own executive Department with the funding of Tony Stark and Stark Industries. Their first clean-up work was the Battle of New York, where they took the job over Adrian Toomes' crew, unknowingly pushing them into villainy.
On top of cleaning up after the messes created by enhanced individuals and aliens, this new Department had its own warehouses where they stored all the dangerous items and artifacts left behind from those battles, similar to SHIELD's respective warehouses like The Fridge.
It was in Fall 2016 when Toomes, as Vulture, raided one of their armored trucks in Washington DC and Spider-Man, in an attempt to stop him, got knocked out and woke up locked in, in one of those warehouses.
Sometime after SHIELD's fall in 2014, the Dapertment Of Damage Control additionally absorbed the rest of the duties of its former parent agency, including responding to supernatural threats and neutralizing them, investigating supernatural incidents, indexing and surveiling potentially dangerous enhanced individuals as well as arresting and detaining them in case they step out of line.
It was around 2017/2018 when they investigated the Doorman incident on the set of Cash Grab 2 and apprehended DeMarr Davis.
8 months after the blip, Agent P. Cleary, who operated out of the DODC's New York Office, was chosen to spearhead the investigation on Peter Parker/Spider-Man regarding the death of Mysterio and the launch of the drone attacks in Mexico, Marocco, Venice, Prague and London, for which he was the prime suspect.
In order to subdue the enhanced, the DODC started using advanced weapons and technology, reverse-engineered from all the items they (and SHIELD) had been confiscating over the years, as well as Stark weapons that Tony had sold to SHIELD prior to 2008, like his sonic canons that were used to subdue the Hulk. The DODC managed to reduce said weapons to the size of a rifle and have been using them as their primary non-lethal neutralizers against superhumans.
In addition to that, the DODC weaponized much of Tony Stark's technology which they confiscated in 2024 during the Spider-Man/Mysterio case, including his EDITH drones, which were used the subsequent year in the hunt of Ms. Marvel and the Djinn known as Clandestines.
The DODC also operates a supermax prison in California since at least 2024, which used to hold Abomination for the last few years of his sentence and also briefly held She-Hulk and the Clandestines, until the release of the former and the escape of the latter.
After his failed operation to apprehend Kamala Khan and Kamran, P. Cleary was relocated to the Los Angeles office of the agency where he and his fellow agents were told by the Deputy Secretary of the Department, Heyerdahl, that they needed to apprehend more enhanced to fill up their prison, unless they wanted the government to cut their funding. This led Agent Cleary tο start an investigation on Simon Williams, who he believed was a dangerous superhuman, with the help of Trevor Slattery as an inside man.
Next, the DODC is rumored to appear in >!Destin Daniel Cretton's Spider-Man: Brand New Day, with Tramell Tillman supposedly playing the DODC's Secretary who will be personally spearheading the hunt for Sadie Sink's dangerous, rogue superhuman character (rumored to be none other than Jean Grey herself), while the DODC as a whole is rumored to become the MCU's mutant-hunting agency in the next Saga after Secret Wars!<
What do you want to see in the DODC's future? Would you like to see a series from their point of view like Agents of SHIELD? Such a show was being developed by the prior Marvel Television leadership back in the mid 2010s, but was eventually cancelled in 2016 before it entered production.
Commentaires
Out of universe: Maybe Sony owns the rights to her due to adjacency to Spider-Man?
EDIT: I'd go even a step further that suggesting in WonderMan, they drop a line that Simon is super dangerous...or could be an asset. Setting up a Freedom Force/X-Factor team led by the DODC.
misstep? I thought it was good
But well really see because at the same time I'd argue that Infinity Stone connection was pretty loose before IW. A whole lot of "Oh yeah this is an Infinity Stone by the way".
Tramell Tillman could be Bolliver Trask, and Sadie Sink *could be* Jean Grey, but I think it's more likely she's Rachel Summers, the daughter of Jean Grey and Scott Summers. Especially since Doom appears to be collecting younger generations of heroes which we sort of get a glimpse of from the Doomsday teasers.
Like I get BND is the last movie coming out before Doomsday so it could have some multiversal ties, but this just seems so left of field for a Spider-Man movie.
None of the rumors I've heard about her really seem plausible but if I had to pick one at least the >!Tobey Maguire's multiversally-displaced daughter!< one fits with it being a Spider-Man movie.
Plus, the trades officially revealed that Sadie will return in Secret Wars, so >!Jean Grey!< is the only one that really makes sense.
So, he's not that reliable either. Alex Perez himself ended up saying they don't think it's Jean either, because she's supposedly a villain, and they're betting more on it being a character who already appeared in Iron Fist (literally, they wrote a whole article with their evidence).
And her being in Secret Wars doesn't mean anything because it wasn't even big news; it was just an extra detail added to another article to mention she'd be filming in that movie. But absolutely nothing was said about her having a leading role or anything important. It could easily be like Mayday's cameo in Civil War, and that's it.
And with the leaked teaser that points to her being a villain and Wonder Man showing that Damage Control isn't interested in mutants, well, the theory pretty much falls apart.
IN THIS SERIES THEY COULDN'T EVEN TOUCH SIMON!!!
And they care so little about mutants that they were content to let Trevor take the blame. Because all they were interested in was a high-profile arrest, not hunting a race that no one in the MCU even knows exists.
They don’t have stop and frisk or random checks yet without probable cause, but it could escalate to that point. In New York Fisk could support stop and frisk.
Sony shot it down because they felt that multiple Spidermen would damage the market.
People then decided that meant it would be part of BND because they really liked it.
OR, for some reason the want to do the Firestar / Iceman buddies like the cartoon?!
wonderman really is self-contained but the forces in the background are busy laying the groundwork for future stories
* Leaks are that Iger told Feige "No" on basing the X-Men on a discrimination angle in the MCU.
* I suspect Feige has very little influence at this point. Feige hasn't had a movie he's controlled be a success since 2022. Guardians was Gunn, Deadpool was Reynolds, Feige's last success was Love & Thunder. I doubt he has the influence to overrule Iger's orders at this stage.
* Iger had queer-coding removed from Ellio, Sabra removed from Brave New World, and a climate crisis subplot removed from Hoppers. I doubt he'd allow a script that could be interpreted as an ICE statement to go through in today's climate if he'd had those other things removed.
* That would make the plot of the MCU X-Men movie the same as the first 7 movies, I can't imagine they'd get much success with a MCU X-Men movie that's the same thing they've already shown 7 times now.
* That plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the MCU with a combined universe. Aliens (Guardians), Gods (Thor), Wizards (Strange, Wanda), Superhumans (Captain America) are all celebrated, but mutants aren't ok and we have to kill them all even though they're the same as the others?
* I can't imagine "Department of Damage Control" is testing well in market research. That's a phenomenally cringe title.
* As Wonderman was scripted before the MCU got into trouble, I'm guessing it's an artifact of the pre-Quantumania direction and will likely disappear.
It is possible, but I strongly suspect that the X-Men are going to avoid everything around discrimination and government persecution, that'd cut its box office in half at best, breaking even would be the best box office they could hope for, and the social media discourse around the movie would be a full-on warzone alienating the general audience.
I think it's going to be a blockbuster focused on some apolitical threat with light inclusion undertones.
First of all, according to the rumors, Damage Control is supposedly conducting an unjustified manhunt against Sink simply for being a mutant, leaving her homeless and forced to seek protection from the Punisher.
This doesn't make sense, since in Wonder Man we saw that even if they have evidence that a character might have powers, they are still bound by the law and can't capture them or start a manhunt because having powers isn't illegal. That's why they recruit Trevor to find evidence confirming that Simon is dangerous.
So either Sink did the most foolish thing of her life, harming many people, or the rumor is simply false.
The rumor also said that Damage Control was kidnapping mutants for experimentation and that they were so powerful they were already laying the groundwork for the Sentinel program. This doesn't make sense because in Wonder Man they say they do so little that the government is cutting their budget. And their prison is almost empty.
And seeing all the work they had to do to get close to Simon, I don't see how they suddenly have several mutants as if nothing happened, and are even planning to create giant robots.
And lastly, and most importantly, in Wonder Man, they reveal that Damage Control isn't interested in where people got their powers. Literally, the reason Simon is spared is because Trevor takes the blame, and since Damage Control only wanted people to arrest, they settled for him. There's not a single indication that they're hunting mutants; the series itself indicates that they found Simon purely by chance and didn't even know where he got his powers.
Even at the end of the series, Agent Cleary mentions that Simon could even be a weapon in their favor, and the series co-creator mentioned that it's likely Simon will try to make a deal with Damage Control. So it's more likely that Damage Control wants to have its own superheroes (like X-Factor) than be the MCU's version of Friends of Humanity.
Alex also said that Marvel is building up the DODC in Wonder Man and BND, in order to lay the groundwork for Sentinels AFTER Secret Wars. We won't see them in Brand New Day.
And well, something these rumors always forget is that she's not "being hunted"; in fact, she's already been captured in a park (according to leaked videos). Then, in what appears to be a police station, she's taken back into custody after passing out. So she probably did do something to justify her arrest.
Regarding the Sentinels, we'll have to see. My bet is that Damage Control will realize they're completely unprepared to face superhuman threats (Wonder Man and Kamala weren't even touched, and Scorpion escaped) and the government will give them extra support and personnel to deal with them. But honestly, I'm more inclined to believe that support will come in the form of Norman Osborn, given that it's a Spider-Man movie and the rumors that we'll soon see Norman. Introducing Bolivar Trask, I feel, would be better suited after Secret Wars in the X-Men movie, where there are already several mutants so that a giant robot doesn't sound so far-fetched.
Also, nobody said that Sadie's character is fully innocent or that she's being persecuted simply for existing as a mutant. Of course she did something. The DODC is not a mutant-hunting agency yet, and they won't be by the time of BND either.
Small scale, doesn't have to link into the overall narrative, and can be a yearly Marvel show for Disney+ in a world where they're trying to move to more traditional style TV shows.
When turned 90 degrees, I can almost see the D morphing into an O and the C becoming an M.
Some rather disappointing additional information: Damage Control was supposed to have a canon VR game for the MCU, released after Iron Man VR, but the game's flop led to the cancellation of DODC. We can assume that some elements were recycled for the Multiverse saga and also in Armor Wars (where else would they find enough Stark technology if not at their own?).
So, perhaps not a series as long as Agents of SHIELD, but a pre-Secret Wars Spotlight to begin establishing the Enhanced and the future Mutants. And given their technology and their role, I wouldn't be against having them as antagonists in the Champions/Young Avengers series, since they already know Kamala.
Disney+ put it as the last project, but I think it should be set a bit earlier, maybe after "the Marvels".
That firmly puts the show in 2027.
There's a late March date in an episode, which means the first 6 episodes take place in that timeframe.
Episode 7 and half of Episode 8 take place a few months later (according to Kathy Friedman), putting them in Summer 2027.
The latte half of Episode 8 is probably around Summer 2028, considering most blockbusters take ~1 year from filming start to release and the scenes with Chuck Eastman probably span a few weeks in Summer or maybe even until early Fall 2028.
The reason it was put at the very end is probably because of how much it spans throughout 1+ year.